professional hilites

1990-95
before the web became the mud our sticks were stuck in

content most recently updated 12.15.01

The Mackerel projects on this page are a selection of projects where my own hands are very evident.
These are a small (mostly award-winning) sampling of the 100+ projects Mackerel created.
There is a small box of awards somewhere in the closet in my studio.

Canadian Encyclopedia Plus (1995)

one of Canada's first hit CD-ROMs

My major contribution was the collage for the splash screen, which was
then recreated for the packaging and became the basis for the product's
identity for the next few years.

Another Mackerel team did the interface work on this project, while
a third party built the database.

This was the last project I was the lead programmer for. It was the
most Mackerel-stack like thing we managed to ever do for a client.
Some things may have stolen more tricks from the stack, but the Mac
version of Try Tercel felt really good and responsive. (Nothing felt
good on a PC then. It was just enough for it to work.)

Changing the color of the car by switching color tables required my
graphics team to really come through and deliver graphics with palette
control they did not believe was possible at first. I got them to
prove themselves wrong.

Birdsong (1993)

Light and Gemstones(1994)

Interactive kiosks for Royal Ontario Museum

Birdsong was also adapted to a CD-ROM. These were produced in Supercard.
Birdsong is still in operation.

Ontario's Mineral Wealth(1993)

educational CD-ROM / Science North kiosk

ROLLOVER NUMBERS TO SEE DIFFERENT SCREENS

Touch screen activity to show products that require mining. Illustrations
were done to spec by Andrew Plewes. This guy was one of the first
real pros I ever worked with. He lived out of town and we only communicated
by phone and fax. Ever.

First he sent a ten page fax with about 3 dozen illustrations and
told us to pick a style. Then we sent him a list of rooms, and the
items that had to be in each of those room, explaining that each item
had to be big and discrete enough to be a touch screen target. I
scanned faxes of his perfect pencils and then coloured them.

Balance of Power (1991)

visitor center kiosk game

This
interactive kiosk game was created with Ontario Hydro to communicate
the complexities of developing a long term energy strategy. I created
most of the designs and did the SuperCard programming and the QuickTime
work.

MacLibrary Interactive Catalogue (1991)

interactive product catalog on floppy disk

This was the first commercial interactive project created with Mackerel.
I designed and programmed this in Hypercard and it fit on a floppy disk.
It featured a listing of over 200 products. The customer could add products
to their catalog and print out a complete order to fax to MacLlibrary.
They really did this

The Mackerel Stack (1990-94)

interactive promotion on floppy disk

We kept building these things and fitting them on floppies. First
in HyperCard, then in SuperCard. This screen from the original stack
is shown at exacts size, in full 2 bit glory. One screen, 8k. We were
making things small before people were ever talking about "bandwidth".